Doomtints

$12M for him is a good price. If healthy he will outperform that rate. If he remains healthy for 50% of a season, you are about breaking even. The question becomes then, will he be healthy for more than 50% of the rest of his career? I don't know. I wouldn't make this move automatically, but if Seattle wanted to eat half his contract I would start listening.

That's a red herring. He is an upgrade for the Twins and we have no idea what the Rays were asking for in return! Sure, he might not hit 30 home runs again. If the Rays were trying to trade him as if he would, yeah, I wouldn't make that trade either. But pick him up for nothing? Sign me up!

That sounds like the Rays being the Rays and not a knock on Cron.

I don't like how fangraphs puts it. Who is the actual author of that bizarre opinion?

I'm glad people are not liking this move. Experience tells me this means he will be great and the same people will be his biggest fans come 12 months from now. </snark>

He is 36 and has 5 years left on his Joe Mauer contract. How many second basemen play until age 40? He sat out half of last year, btw. If Seattle wants to eat half of his contract and take no one in return, sure, let's talk.

He looks like a very good pick up. 1) Over his career he has been good v. both lefties and righties, but in 2018 he started to dominate lefties. 2) He plays very well in Target Field. 3) He massacres average and below pitchers, and can hold his own v. the power pitchers. Three teams in one year for him, though ... how is his personality?

Baseball-Reference says the most similar player to C.J. Cron is .... Kennys Vargas. Undervaluing home grown players is fun.

1) Why the heck did the Rays waive C.J. Cron? 2) Looks like the Twins have their first baseman ... and gave up nothing to get him.

Syndergaard is injury prone, He is a couple of years behind Yu Darvish but on the same trajectory. The Twins have enough guys whose body parts are in danger of falling off at any moment. The silver lining is he would be cheap (salary-wise) if the Twins want to take the risk. I would say let some other team dole out prospects for a guy who will max out at 120-140 innings/yr until the inevitable 0-60 innings/yr injury event happens (again). The Twins are (re-)building and sending prospects packing for a guy with this profile when there are 6-8 roles to fill doesn't make sense, in my opinion. The Mets don't need to salary dump the guy so the prospect price will be too high for how much risk this would be taking on.

The consensus on Sano is "He'll end up at first someday." What if that "someday" happens earlier than we expect? In other words, what if the Twins lock up 1B wtih another player, and Sano gets injured at 3rd (again)? It will take him time to adjust fully to 1B and play well there. It's better to do this while he is younger. Or, better yet, just put the guy at DH and get it over with. This maximizes the way the team can build, because it keeps dollars off of the DH position while putting someone there who can hit at DH more than adequately. Sano's value is not defense.

Cheese.

It's more than a stupid statement ... this is what the FO has to deal with when they try to create a budget. You can bet he said this to them already.

Someone who plays as hard as Astudillo will always have a job in baseball. Like Cuddyer, Punto, and Buxton, his value is his ability to push the dial to 11. He is the quintessential Twin.

Who is to say the Twins could not have traded someone other than Hu? Also, I didn't "complain about the trade" -- I simply said I didn't like it, and that is based purely on losing Hu. The Twins didn't win anything in 2015, btw. I don't expect Hu to be the best thing since sliced bread or anything, but he was starting to shine when the Twins set him free. (I have no clue how he has played since, mind you, but with just a cursory glance it looks like he could have been a nice asset out of the pen.) He's still only 25! Also, who do you trust more: Cleveland's ability to rate a pitcher, or then-Twins management's ability to rate one? I'm pleasantly surprised that Hu is remembered at all. He seemed to appear on everyone's radar at the same time and was traded very quickly after that.

The Mariners are screwed. Look at how many players they have exposed in the Rule 5 draft this year! TERRIBLE management. No team should lose that many players at once. They should have been pulling off trades, even if they're just swapping minor league players. I like your ideas overall. Also, the Amiga days were fun days. I had a love affair with my C-128, though I did have an Amiga 2000 around too.

I didn't like this trade at the time. Let's hope he doesn't dominate the Twins....

The problem with OPS is that it counts the single event twice (once in OBP, once in SLG). For your purposes, you don't want that inaccuracy. Use OBP instead of OPS. For power guys it matters less. For them, using OPS is fine. In Mauer's MVP season, if you account for the fact that singles are double-counted and remove them from either calculation, his OPS drops quite a bit. But when you look at Killebrew's MVP season and account for the singles the same way his OPS doesn't change nearly as much.

I know about the negatives, but thanks for your politeness.

Twins lawyers no doubt discovered this before processing the paperwork banning him from the stadium. Looks like he's using the same, "Who, me? I didn't do anything! (And if I did you didn't prove it)" arguments with the Twins. I used to know a guy who acted like this. Let's just say he burned a lot of bridges with a lot of people and leave it at that.

Look up "security theater" on wikipedia. If you LOOK like you are doing things to be more secure, that itself can be a deterrent.

Revision: Sano, Buxton and Castro for Bryant.

Pulling a coach from the college ranks is unprecedented and risky. I'm glad they are thinking outside the box, but this is like making an intern a VP. Very risky.

Want a big splash? Sano, Buxton, and Kepler for Kris Bryant.

It used to be that the first signing was the biggest, and that signing set the market value for everybody else. This has changed. Now the scrubs go earlier and the expensive guys go later. I see no reason a team couldn't disrupt all of this and grab the good guys right away, leaving the other teams having to fight over the scraps as the Twins had to do every year. Teams are afraid of overpaying now, though.